Harry Browne Quotes

Our government has become incompetent, unresponsive, corrupt. And that incompetence, ineptitude, lack of accountability is now dangerous.

The realization is dawning that government doesn't work. In Silicon Valley, they already get this. And they are bright enough to be asking what we can do to solve problems.

I would say that Barack Obama has always been a real optimist about what can be accomplished. He believes that government can be used to create systemic, long-term, real change. And the first lady is more of a skeptic.

Government is dysfunctional.

Everything government touches turns to crap.

The Congress is a dysfunctional institution; it's broken. One of our three branches of government is broken.

In the institution of societies, mankind in all probability thought father of redressing the evils, which they had experienced, than of procuring the several advantages resulting from laws, from commerce, from the arts and sciences, and from all those other improvements so frequently mentioned in history.

Governments never lead; they follow progress

Washington is broken but America still works.

Sometimes it requires national impetus to deliver real change.

You wonder sometimes how our government puts on its pants in the morning.

For fifty years now, we have tried big government. Yet too many people remain trapped in despair. Now, we must try a new way.

The machinery of government is a vast series of interlocking hierarchies riddled through and through with incompetence.

It's hard not to get down on the government when you see dysfunction play out on our TVs every day. Frankly, sometimes at every level of government.

Government sponsors untold waste, criminality and inequality in every sphere of life it touches, giving little or nothing in return.

Most of the problems of government come from people being overwhelmed by the size and scale of what they have to do.

Anything that the private sector can do, the government can do it worse.

The government's like a mule, it's slow and it's sure; it's slow to turn, and it's sure to turn the way you don't want it.

You can't change laws without first changing human nature.

As coercive monopolies that spend other people's money taken by force, governments are uniquely unqualified to solve problems. They are riddled by ignorance, perverse incentives, incompetence and are self-serving.

The government shouldn't run anything, because it cannot run anything.

I have a message for the world, which I will deliver without fear and care for the future. To the reformers I will point out that I am a greater reformer than any one of them. They want to reform only little bits. I want root-and-branch reform.

Competence doesn't seem like a big deal until you are forced to realize that your own government has none.

We want to ensure a multilateral development of society, the thriving of all sides of social life, economy, science and culture, the improvement of management, the moulding of the new man and the promotion of socialist ethics and equity.

Once we realize that government doesn't work, we will stop dreaming that this or that social problem can be solved by passing a law - or by creating a new government program - or by electing someone who will make Washington more efficient or cost-conscious.